Unit embarked from Sydney, New South Wales, on board HMAT A24 Benalla on 9 November 1916

Rank from Nominal Roll

Private

Unit from Nominal Roll

3rd Battalion

Fate

Killed in Action 4 October 1917

Place of death or wounding

Zonnebeke, Belgium

Age at death

29

Age at death from cemetery records

29

Place of burial

No known grave

Commemoration details

The Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial (Panel 7), Belgium

The Menin Gate Memorial (so named because the road led to the town of Menin)
was constructed on the site of a gateway in the eastern walls of the old Flemish
town of Ypres, Belgium, where hundreds of thousands of allied troops passed on
their way to the front, the Ypres salient, the site from April 1915 to the end
of the war of some of the fiercest fighting of the war.

The Memorial was conceived as a monument to the 350,000 men of the British
Empire who fought in the campaign. Inside the arch, on tablets of Portland
stone, are inscribed the names of 56,000 men, including 6,178 Australians,
who served in the Ypres campaign and who have no known grave.

The opening of the Menin Gate Memorial on 24 July 1927 so moved the
Australian artist Will Longstaff that he painted 'The Menin Gate at Midnight',
which portrays a ghostly army of the dead marching past the Menin Gate.
The painting now hangs in the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, at the
entrance of which are two medieval stone lions presented to the Memorial by
the City of Ypres in 1936.

Since the 1930s, with the brief interval of the German occupation in the
Second World War, the City of Ypres has conducted a ceremony at the Memorial
at dusk each evening to commemorate those who died in the Ypres campaign.

Panel number, Roll of Honour, Australian War Memorial

37

Miscellaneous information from cemetery records

Parents: James and Catherine KIRKPATRICK, 88 Alice Street, Newtown, New South Wales. Native of Hoxton Park, New South Wales